Opinion: Best FREE Antivirus software

[Willy Strong]

MSE.

 

[snail]

To be honest there are so many factors that influence your decisions as to what is the best.

1) What is your primary use for a pc (gaming, work, movies etc)
2) Do you have access to the internet, if so, are you permanently connected?
3) Do other individuals utilise your machine?
4)Do you constantly receive all your information (ie: music, documents, movies etc) from other individuals, or do you download / create the aforementioned examples yourself?
5)Do you utilise original software or pirated software?
6)Are you linked to a VPN, LAN with other users connected?

There are so many variables to consider in deciding which is the best. Everyone has a different use therefore I just say if it does the job for you then use it. If you are working in a hostile environment (as in access to some potentially hectic worms, trojans, viruses and spyware) then you are going to require bigger guns to fight the battle.

 

[Dark Agent]

I use AVG Free, had no problems as of yet, tried several others, but keep going back to AVG

+1

I prefer AVG and second Avast.
I never ever had a problem, Only when idiots damn click on the virus to activate then it goes pass most anti virus programs.
MSE also great but for security programmers is annoying...
AV is never perfect, if virus signature changes the virus will not be detected. So it all depends on the user.

On my current pc I use AVG(Free). On my other pc where I dnt worry about I installed both AVG(Free) and Avast(Free).
No issues for 14months already.

Malwarebytes is another additional add-on for extra protection.

 

[m4dh4tt3r]

MSE for me, been using it for over 2 years and never had a virus on my machine.

In my personal opinion, no one can make a microsoft product more secure than microsoft themselves (people seem to hate microsoft but they have only done great things for the average user - disagree or not that is another discussion altogether). They are not interested in competing to sell a security program to people, they just want to make sure that for the general average user windows is secure and also people who are not very technical they dont really need to learn to configure the antivirus, its simple, effective and works wonders(I am a technical person and I do fiddle around but there is no need with MSE). Also i have not experienced any issues with MSE and using alot of system resources.

 

[robertwj]

MSE does the job well for home use. If only it included email scanning and network protection then it would be a great business package!

 

[Gozzy]

Microsoft Security Essentials for a couple years now .... not a single infection, out of all my AV experiences over a period of 10yrs MSE is simply the best AV out there..and it's free.

and no I do not work for Microsoft

 

[neilronaldson]

MSE

 

[Kloofvreter]

MSE